TikTok India starts hiring for job roles in Gurgaon amid reports of comeback - Is ban getting lifted?

TikTok India has opened two positions at its Gurgaon office. The company has posted jobs on LinkedIn for “Content Moderator (Bengali Speaker), Trust and Safety” and “Wellbeing Partnership and Operations Lead, Trust and Safety.”

Indian govt denies lifting ban

The hiring activity comes just weeks after TikTok’s website became partially accessible to some Indian users, fuelling speculation that the Chinese video platform could be preparing for a comeback. However, the app remains banned in India.

“The Government of India has not issued any unblocking order for TikTok. Any such statement or news is false and misleading," according to a Hindustan Times report citing sources in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

In the recruitment ad, TikTok stated: “Building a world where people can safely discover, create and connect. The Trust & Safety (T&S) team at ByteDance helps ensure that our global online community is safe and empowered to create and enjoy content across all of our applications. We have invested heavily in human and machine-based moderation to remove harmful content quickly and often before it reaches our general community.”

About the Content Moderator position, it specified, “Content that Content Moderator interacts with includes images, video, and text related to every-day life, but it can also include (but is not limited to) bullying; hate speech; child safety; depictions of harm to self and others, and harm to animals.”

Currently, the app is still unavailable on both the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in India.

The ByteDance-owned company was one of 59 Chinese applications banned by New Delhi in June 2020, alongside UC Browser and WeChat.

What led to TikTok's ban in India?

The ban followed the Galwan Valley strife between Indian and Chinese troops and was justified on grounds of national security and data privacy.

TikTok is the world's leading platform for short-form video, which claimed to have around 200 million users in India as of January 2020.

Chinese apps were suspected of setting backdoors in their hardware and software, a frequently cited concern by several countries where officials have been cautious of deploying Chinese-made 5G networking equipment.

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